I know. I studied those pages over and over (deeply thought them over already yet another time after you blamed Pax for my mishaps!).
I studied those hardened-related pages enough to advise everybody, even cleverer than me, to never ever use NSA's SE Linux, but to first thing upon emerging the hardened sources and issueing:

Sync later today and icedtea should build using icedtea-bin, both with 6 or 7.

I'm looking forward very much to it!
Thanks again! What would us poor users do without you developers?
I have to disclaim though that it's only my gut feeling and trust in Spender's words in the article which make me believe and advise as above.
If anyone knows, but really knows better, let us hear from him on the matter.
Because I am thorougly insufficiently competent in the matter. No programming knowledge of any significance!
But hey, Google, Facebook, all those engines and social media associates of theirs, spy, that's a fact, it's no invention, it's a fact...
The Superpower, and I do respect the Nation, but the Government is not the Nation itself, is truly a little too keen on... Enough said. Gotta go!

I just noticed after doing a sync portage wants to install this icedtea 7, which wants me to install no less than 72 unconditional dependencies for GUI and printing bloat that has no business being installed on a server. WTF? Is there a sane Java 7 ebuild out there, or do I have to stick with 6 forever?

egads! I noticed the very same. I was a bit sick in my mouth when I saw it. Fortunately a swift...

echo 'USE="${USE} -X -cups -alsa"' >> /etc/portage/make.conf

...kicked it right in the nuts. Globally you ask? Why yes! Who wants any of that nonsense on a server anyway

I was just trying to install icedtea and noticed that, even though this thread is already three years old, icedtea is still masked in portage.

Are there still any major problems with icedtea in Gentoo?

If oracle-jdk is not free and icedtea is still masked, what JVM are Gentoo users supposed to use?

I am not a java developer or java enthusiast, so I'm not really up to speed with differences between available JVMs, and my only preference is that I want to avoid non-free software if reasonably possible, and that I don't want to have to manually download the software with web browser every time I upgrade one of my machines...

The reason icedtea never got marked stable are issues like not respecting CFLAGS and the like. My next attempt will be getting icedtea-8 past the arch teams. Apart from that icedtea works perfectly fine, just I recommend to not use alternative vms like jamvm or cacao for performance and resource reasons.